That wouldn’t stop him either. Nothing would.
She cast around the small space, looking for something, anything, to defend herself. A box of file folders. A rolling chair. A shelf with a row of glass beakers. Maybe the acoustic tiles overhead hid a false ceiling where she could escape.
The door exploded inward, crushing the corner of the first desk. Splinters and a strip of metal blew through the room. The rebound sent the second desk spinning crazily. It knocked her to the ground.
She tried to roll and screamed at the pain in her leg.
Broken. She knew that physical sensation of sound, of bone grating on bone. The right femur was snapped in half. She wouldn’t be able to stand until her teshuva healed her.
From outside, Corvus shoved at the debris, all that was keeping him from entering.
She clawed through the wreckage, avoiding the chair that rolled toward her as he crashed through. Glass from the shattered beakers cut her palms.
Her fingers closed around the metal strip.
She rolled to her back, saw him looming over her, and lashed out with the thin metal.
He recoiled, but the tip grazed diagonally across his face. Blood sprayed. Before she could attack again, he lunged, pinning her wrist under his boot, grinding her hand into the broken glass. On either side of the bloody line, his eyes narrowed.
Okay, yeah, they were doomed.
He plucked the measly weapon from her grasp, slicing her fingers. She bit into her lip rather than cry out.
Without the teshuva focused on the djinni, she finally could see the man. Blunt features, thick neck, shaved bullet head. He looked like a gladiator. The scratch she’d given him was healing, almost lost among the myriad faint scars on his face.
But his eyes . . . She’d expected anything—crimson red, jaundiced orange, deep black, or blank white—besides this shimmering, celestial blue.
He wrapped his fingers around her neck and straightened, pulling her upright, up to her toes, then off her feet entirely. The ring on his finger cut into her throat. He held her aloft without straining.
“Where is your demon?” He gave her a little shake, as if she might be hiding it in her pocket. “Teshuva coward, where are you? You’d abandon your woman to fight your battles alone?”
She clawed at his fingers around her neck, prying at the large-stoned ring she could feel but not see. She kicked, but the agony in her leg almost made her vomit, not good while being choked.
Her all-too-human vision darkened. She supposed she should be glad for a relatively painless death, compared to poor Zane’s.
On the other hand, she finally understood Archer’s desire to go out in a blaze of demon-shredding glory.
She’d add her own demon to the ass kicking. The teshuva had promised her strength, and she was dying from want of air.
As the blackness closed around her, her last sight was those heavenly eyes, and her last thought that heaven should be pissed.
CHAPTER 23
Half buried in leaves beside the daybed, Archer’s cell phone buzzed. He glared at it balefully. Wouldn’t be good news. When was it ever?
Because he feared whom the bad news might be about, he answered on the last ring before the call went to voice mail.
The voice on the other end was tentative. “This is Nanette. Sera’s friend. I don’t know if you remember me.”
“The faith healer.” A prickle of unease went through him. “Is Sera all right?”
A pause on the other end. “She’s not with you? I had the impression . . . Sorry to bother you.”
“Wait.” He gripped the phone. “What’s wrong?”
“Someone needs to talk to her, rather urgently, and I can’t reach her. I remembered you gave Wendy, the nursing home director, the name of your cleaning service. I called them—who needs a twenty-four-hour dry cleaner?—and they agreed to give me your phone number if I promised to tell you not to send them any more business like yours. I said I would, and I have.”
Archer closed his eyes, struggling for patience. “Can we get to the ‘rather urgently’ part?”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Not at the moment.” Likely never again.
“We have to find her. She’s in terrible danger.”
“She’s possessed by a demon. Of course she’s in danger.” He tensed at the thought of what the angelic host would do to her if they discovered she could open a path into the demon realm.
“Not just danger to her soul. Real danger. I mean, her soul being in danger is real danger—”
“Urgently,” Archer reminded her.
“Sorry. I’ve just never seen anything like this. All he keeps saying is he needs Sera.”
“He?” Archer’s blood froze. “Nanette, listen. You may be dealing with a djinn-possessed man. And he is most definitely dangerous.”
“No, this is just a man. And he’s hurt.”
“He could be disguising what he is, to gain your trust.”
“Mr. Archer,” Nanette said briskly, “I am host to an angel, a lesser angel, but even I’d smell a djinni this close.”
“He’s with you now?” Archer was already pulling on his boots.
“Yes. He knew Sera came to me, but he says he needs Sera too, to be healed.”
Archer automatically checked the weight of the axe in his coat. “What does he think Sera can do?”
“I have no idea. I don’t think even the highest seraph could help.”
“Is he dying?”
“I don’t know what will happen if he does. This man doesn’t have a soul.”
Archer, with the club out but the blade retracted, ghosted through the dark cinder-block church, demon senses ranging out around him like a pack of leashed hunting dogs. No djinn.
He recognized Nanette in the doorway of the main office. She wrung her hands, but her distress seemed contained. His concern that she had called him under duress faded.
“This way,” she called.
He stepped cautiously into the smaller room—and froze when he saw Bookie splayed on the couch.
The historian lifted his head and groaned. “You’re not Sera.”
“No.” Archer circled toward the couch. “What the hell’s going on, Bookie? Where’s Sera? She was supposed to be meeting with you.”
“I need her. I have to find her.”
Nanette sighed. “He won’t say anything else. I almost called my husband, but then I noticed his”—she waved one hand helplessly—“his lack.”
“His missing soul.”
She nodded, her face ashen. “I know the teshuva lost the vision for what lies within, but my angel sees the brightness of someone’s soul.” Her gaze slid away from him. “Or darkness. But there’s always
something
there. With him, nothing.” She lowered her voice. “It sickens me to see. Like falling into a well. I can’t imagine what it’s doing to him.”
Archer watched Bookie through narrowed eyes. “I don’t see how losing your soul suddenly makes you stupid.”
Nanette gazed at him reprovingly. “I think he’s gone a bit mad.”
“I have no problem with mad. He just has to share the details.” Archer loomed over him. “Bookie, where’s your soul? And what’s Sera supposed to do about it?”
From behind his glasses, the man’s gaze flicked over him, incuriously. That, more than anything, made Archer believe something was wrong. Bookie had never been able to look at any of them without at least a hint of frustrated superiority. “I need Sera.”
“Right. For what?”
“I have to drive her away, destroy her havens, make you doubt her. I have to give her to him.”
A chill spidered down Archer’s spine. Bookie had tossed Sera’s apartment, keeping her on the run from . . . ? “Who’s ‘he,’ Bookie?” The freeze all but stopped his heart as bitter logic supplied the name. “Corvus.”
“He said I had to make an opening, make a place for it, in me.”
More questions without answers for the first ones. “Make a place for what?”
“He stole it from me. Now he’ll steal hers. Steal it and set them all free.” He muttered in Latin.
Archer grabbed the man’s shoulders and shook him. “All what, Bookie?”
“The demons,” Bookie shrieked. “All the demons. He’ll free all the demons.” His shriek rose to a glass-shattering pitch. “I wanted a demon. She took it, and it was supposed to be mine.”
Archer recoiled. Bookie began to cry. The gut-wrenching sobs shook him harder than Archer had.
“Why would anyone want to be possessed?” Nanette whispered.
“Only a fool.” Archer stared down at the weeping man.
Bookie had betrayed them.
The man looked up, tears speckling the inside of his glasses. “Don’t let him eat her demon. It’s mine.”
Everything came together in Archer’s head. Bookie e-mailing Sera for a meeting time. Sera slipping out. She’d gone to the meeting . . . with Corvus. Only hours ago.
He hauled Bookie upright with such violence his glasses flew off. “Where did he take her? Damn you, Bookkeeper. Where?”
“Mine,” Bookie mumbled. “I helped make the hole in the Veil, and he made a hole in me, so it’s mine. I need it.”
Archer cursed and spun away, grabbing his cell phone. He punched in Niall’s number, and was speaking almost before the other man could answer. “Corvus has Sera. Bookie sold us out. Retrace Bookie’s movements for the last forty-eight hours. He’s been in Corvus’s presence within that period. We need the djinn-man’s lair.”
He hung up, grabbed Bookie again, and headed for the door. “You, take me to your leader.”
“Wait,” Nanette cried. “I’m going with you.”
Archer didn’t slow. “This could get messy.”
“I might be able to help. If I see the wandering soul . . .”
“You’d help him?”
She bit her lip. “I told you, I don’t think I can. But the soul might lead us to this Corvus. And Sera. And if he is trying to unlock the demon realm, you need all the help you can get.”
Archer stared at her. He’d traded the deadliest force of talyan fighters for a soulless traitor and a bottom-rung angelic possessed.
Hell of a way to save the world.
Corvus paced in front of the talya bound on the floor, small and pale as the exotic gazelle that had once been thrown into the arena with him. That had been an absurd match, his hacking sword against the delicate, curving horns that weren’t even aimed at him. He’d slaughtered the beast with blood-soaked thoroughness, to the crowd’s screaming delight. His soul had withered.
And that had been before the djinni came to him.
He crouched, nostrils flaring to catch the scent of blood still seeping from her wounds.
Where was the demon? Why did it let her bleed? Unease swept through him.
The crow cheeped, a ridiculous sound, and poked noisily through the empty shells in the bottom of its cage. He hadn’t remembered to feed it, distracted as he was by the destruction he was about to unleash.
But the key to unlocking the door to the demon realm was still unconscious. He’d almost killed her once already in his impatience.
The crow squalled. To shut it up, he threw a handful of seeds at the cage. Ungrateful wretch.
When he turned back, the talya was still slumped on the ground but was watching him.
He strode across the room to tower over her.
She stared up, no violet in her eyes.
He grabbed the waistband of her jeans and ripped. The sound of tearing denim was lost in her scream as the pant leg snagged around her broken thigh.
Pinning her down with his foot when she flailed at him, he stripped her pants. He gripped the bruised flesh of her thigh and squeezed. Her scream cut off in a sob-choked gasp.
He traced one finger along the curving lines of her demon mark. Such perfect arcs, like the gentle bend of heated black glass, spun finer and finer toward the juncture of soft skin between her legs.
His hand resting on the triangle of silk left covering her, he met her tear-bright gaze. “Summon it.”
“I must’ve left it in my other pants pocket.” Her voice rasped through her strained throat. “Just let me run home and get it.”
“I am through waiting.”
“Two thousand years finally enough?”
He backhanded her, not so hard as to break her slender neck, and settled to his haunches. “Why do you talyan delight in needling me? I just feel better about hurting you.”
“Zane teased you, so you tortured him? And Bookie
too, I suppose?” Her voice cracked. “What’s your excuse for loosing demons on the world?”
He rolled up his sleeves, revealing the jagged black marks climbing like ancient thorny vines upward from both elbows. “The world welcomes its demons with open arms, just like your Bookworm. He came to me, you know, tracked me down through Bookkeeper archives. He thought he could drill through the Veil and tap the energy on the other side. He envied you talyan your power, and wanted his own.” He held out his hands, palms up in mock helplessness. “Maybe everyone should have a chance to face their demons, and I am only midwife to the inevitable.”
She snorted, triggering a coughing jag. “Whatever Bookie wanted, I didn’t agree to play mother to the coming horde.”
“How convenient that I don’t require your cooperation.” He walked away.
He didn’t need her willingness, but he did need her demon ascendant. Only its energy coursing through its link to the demon realm would reveal the weakness in the Veil. And the cowardly teshuva was nowhere to be found.
He smoothed his palms over the clamps and shears and jagged rods of glass—the tools he’d arranged so carefully on his desk in preparation for their discussion. Without the demon, she wouldn’t survive five minutes of his most gentle techniques.
He glanced back at the woman. She’d taken a possessed as her lover, Bookie had said, and with him found a way to cast out evil.
For a moment, Corvus wondered.
But no. A djinni was no paltry darkling to be shooed back to the Darkness that did not fade. Unbidden, his breath quickened. The acid sting of his demon scoured the backs of his eyes.